What's your memory assessment speed?

ZaLiTH said:

Music Guy123 said:

Really, is DDR2 not as good as DDR3 and other ones??? I didn't think that 400mhz was that good or 8000mb/s. How do i know if it is running at its full potential, can RAM be underclocked or something similar to what they do with processors???

It seems the average DDR2-800 (PC6400) score is between 5000 and 7000MB/s, anything higher than 7500MB/s can be considered a more-than-decent speed.. If you want something in the 5-digit range (10000+), you'll need something like the DDR2-1066 (PC8500) in dual channel.

Keep in mind that although it's nice to have nice high scores for the memory access speed, your PC will still be restricted in certain ways by other hardware (HDD, CPU, etc). For motherboards that only take DDR2, because of the other hardware you'll probably never really benefit from DDR3-class speeds anyway...


Anyways, in case anybody's interested, the Phenom II x3 740 BE that I bought doesn't like my motherboard, so I made a plan with a friend of mine to upgrade his PC and allow me to take his old CPU. So I still got a slight upgrade (5400+ to 6000+), but I can't clock this 6000+ at 200MHz core like my old proc... So my memory assessment speed is down from about 8600/8700MB/s to about 8300MB/s now.

So it means that I really have a good pair of RAM sticks?

ZaLiTH said:

oreo27 said:

So it means that I really have a good pair of RAM sticks?

Haha... Yeah, I'd say so. You should also keep in mind that it's a combination of components that determines how well your RAM runs; while more components do affect it, for AMDs it's more a "CPU/RAM" thing, for Intels it's more a "Motherboard/RAM" situation.

I still find it interesting how people interpret the PCxxxx naming scheme... According to Wikipedia, PC6400 has a peak transfer rate of 6400MB/s, PC8500 peaks at 8500MB/s etc etc. And of course, following suite, their DDR3 page has a similar graph where DDR3-PC6400 also peaks at 6400MB/s. I'm no expert on the topic, but I'm pretty darn certain those details aren't exactly true...

Well, I got these for a dirt cheap price so I'm pretty happy about it.

ZaLiTH said:

oreo27 said:

Well, I got these for a dirt cheap price so I'm pretty happy about it.

Actually, that's not too surprising... A friend of mine got stuck with faulty RAM but the supplier wouldn't take it back for some reason, so out of desperation (and lack of funds) he went and bought 2 of the cheapest DDR2 memory modules he could find.

Well, today he's getting about 9400MB/s access speeds at 800MHz...... I wanted to kick him when I found out. My RAM cost me nearly R800 (about US$120 for reference) nearly two years back, and I don't even get that speed with mine overclocked...

Well, that just goes to show that price isn't everything.